Friday, October 28, 2011

That's an appalling musical reference, but sadly it's the only tie-in I can think of to announce that I will be presenting at the FTTH Forum in Budapest on 9th November. (Edit: Okay, it's Friday at the end of a long week, and I conflated "Hungarian Rhapsody" with "Bohemian Rhapsody." My bad. In retrospect, perhaps I should have tried to invoke Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna.") My talk will broadly cover some of the points I raised here, but I'll mainly focus on CityFibre's strategy around a holistic view of fibre across an entire community, with buy-in from local government as the key bedrock upon which other developments rest. Our recent project in York is a compelling example of how this can work to create tremendous optionality for all stakeholders.

I'll also be speaking at the NextGen conference in Bristol on 15th November, covering broadly the same ground, but also revisiting some of the themes I covered in my previous NextGen appearance in Manchester two years ago (slides). As I tried to stress then, I expect there may be a large gap between the perceived value of fibre today (i.e., the tiresome "it's a better triple play") versus the "option value" of fibre as an enabler of applications and services we haven't even dreamt of yet.

As I've stated numerous times over the years, the flaw in the current structure of the "telecom industry" is that conventional telcos, as constituted today, will find it impossible to capture the benefits of those developments in a way which translates directly into "shareholder value." As such, they have limited incentive to invest in enabling the benefits of such innovation across an entire community. Ergo, I would argue that a strategy focused on "stakeholder value" is the appropriate framework for moving forward. Call it "A Unified Theory of Fibre."

If you're planning on being at either event, by all means stop by and say hello.